Environmental concerns are at the top of the agenda around the world. Judaism, like the other world religions, only rarely raised issues concerning the environment in the past. This means that modern Judaism, the halakhic tradition no less than others, must build on a slim foundation in its efforts to give guidance. The essays in this volume mark the beginning of a new effort to face questions -- and formulate answers -- of vital importance.

How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.

Garthine Walker reveals that women were not treated leniently by the courts and that beliefs about gender and order impacted on real legal outcomes in early modern England. She demonstrates that the household role had as much to do with the nature of criminality as the individual in this period. Challenging hitherto accepted views regarding gender stereotyping, this book illuminates the complexities of everyday English life in the early modern period.

The essays in this text deal with aspects of British legal learning. It traces the tradition of learning dating back to the Middle Ages and how the inns of court provided the equivalent of a legal university. The essays describe how before the middle of the 19th-century there was little formal provision of legal education in Britain and that law in the ancient universities was not intended to have practical value and entrance to the bar was not dependent upon written examination.

In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages are often associated with lawlessness. As historians have long recognized, however, medieval culture was characterized by an enormous respect for law, legal procedure, and the ideals of justice and equity. Many of our most important modern institutions and legal conceptions grew out of medieval law in its myriad forms (Roman, canon, common, customary, and feudal).
Institutional structures represent only a small portion of the wider cultural field affected by—and affecting—law. In Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe such distinguished scholars as Patrick Geary, William Chester Jordan, R. I. Moore, Edward M. Peters, and Susan Mosher Stuard make the case that the development of law is deeply implicated in the growth of medieval theology and Christian doctrine; the construction of discourses on sin, human nature, honor, and virtue; the multiplying forms governing chivalry, demeanor, and social interaction, including gender relations; and the evolution of scholasticism, from its institutional context within the university to its forms of presentation, argumentation, and proof.

In this groundbreaking narrative of one of America?s most divisive trials and executions, award-winning journalist Bruce Watson mines deep archives and newly available sources to paint the most complete portrait available of the ?good shoemaker? and the ?poor fish peddler.? Opening with an explosion that rocks a quiet Washington, D.C., neighborhood and concluding with worldwide outrage as two men are executed despite widespread doubts about their guilt, Sacco & Vanzetti is the definitive history of an infamous case that still haunts the American imagination.

What impact has Christianity had on the law from its beginnings to the present day? This 2008 introduction explores the main legal teachings of Western Christianity, set out in the texts and traditions of scripture and theology, philosophy and jurisprudence. It takes up the weightier matters of the law that Christianity has profoundly shaped - justice and mercy, rule and equity, discipline and love - as well as more technical topics of canon law, natural law, and state law. Some of these legal creations were wholly original to Christianity. Others were converted from Jewish and classical traditions. Still others were reformed by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophers. But whether original or reformed, these Christian teachings on law, politics and society have made and can continue to make fundamental contributions to modern law in the West and beyond.

Law's Imagined Republic shows how the American Revolution was marked by the rapid proliferation of law talk across the colonies. This legal language was both elite and popular, spanned different forms of expression from words to rituals, and included simultaneously real and imagined law. Since it was employed to mobilize resistance against England, the proliferation of revolutionary legal language became intimately intertwined with politics. Drawing on a wealth of material from criminal cases, Steven Wilf reconstructs the intertextual ways Americans from the 1760s through the 1790s read law: reading one case against another and often self-consciously comparing transatlantic legal systems as they thought about how they might construct their own legal system in a new republic. What transformed extraordinary tales of crime into a political forum? How did different ways of reading or speaking about law shape our legal origins? And, ultimately, how might excavating innovative approaches to law in this formative period, which were constructed in the street as well as in the courtroom, alter our usual understanding of contemporary American legal institutions? Law's Imagined Republic tells the story of the untidy beginnings of American law.